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I use Gravity Forms on all my sites, but this issue can arise from any form plugin because WordPress uses PHP to send mail.

The best solution is probably to send email over SMTP. But that is a bit of a chore, and will probably require you to sign up for a SendGrid (or similar) subscription service. Not a biggy, but when you build lots of sites like I do, it’s sort of a bummer.

Here’s an alternative:

1. Go to your Gmail inbox and click the little ‘down-arrow’ located on the right side of the search box.
   
2. In the ‘From’ field, put the email address that is used by your form (in Gravity Forms, this is found in the form’s Notification settings – Note that there is a difference between ‘from’ and ‘reply-to’).
3. Click on ‘Create a filter with this search >>’
4. Check the ‘Never send it to Spam’ box and then ‘Create filter’

That oughtta’ do it. Good luck!

The post Prevent Gravity Forms Notifications from Getting Stuck in Your Spam Folder (Easily) appeared first on Nick Pierno.

This isn’t every single tool I’ve ever used, but it’s a pretty comprehensive list of the ones I use for most projects.

Bolded tools are ones I think are must-haves. Hope you find something useful!

Full disclosure: Some of these are affiliate links, and I may get a small kickback from the company if you choose to purchase from them. This has in no way influenced my suggestions. Some of them are free, some of them have no affiliate program, etc. I just figured I might as well use them if the vendor provides them 

Websites & WordPress

DOMAINS & EMAIL

• Namecheap
• Google G Suite

THEMES

• Astra
• OceanWP
• Impreza
• Jupiter
• Salient
• Avada
• Envato Market
• Themeforest

STOCK RESOURCES

• BigStock
• Pond5
• Iconfinder

MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING

• WP Engine
• Flywheel
• WPX Hosting

GENERAL PLUGINS

• Yoast
• Toolset
• Better Search and Replace
• Relevanssi
• Sumome
• Sendgrid
• Disqus
• Reusable Text Blocks
• Thive Leads

CLOUD HOSTING

• DigitalOcean
• Google Cloud Platform
• Cloudways
• ServerPilot

PAGE BUILDERS

• Elementor
• WPBakery Page Builder (aka Visual Composer)
• Beaver Builder
• Divi

FORMS

• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms
• Contact Forms 7

TRADITIONAL HOSTING

• SiteGround
• Inmotion

ECOMMERCE

• WooCommerce
• Follow Ups
• WooCommerce Stripe Gateway
• Shopify

OTHER SWEET STUFF

• Adobe Photoshop CC (Photographer Plan)
• 1Password
• FreshBooks
• Buffer
• MailChimp
• Streak for Gmail

SEO & Marketing

PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Klipfolio
• Supermetrics
• Google Data Studio
• Google Tag Manager
• Google URL Builder

KEYWORD & CONTENT RESEARCH

• Adwords Keyword Planner
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• SEMrush
• Ubersuggest
• Mergewords
• Answer The Public

CALL TRACKING & 800 NUMBERS

• CallRail
• Phonewagon
• Adwords Call Forwarding

LINK BUILDING & RESEARCH

• Ahrefs
• MozBar
• Open Site Explorer
• SEMrush
• ContactOut Email Finder

PAID ADVERTISING

• Google Adwords
• Facebook/Instagram
• Outbrain

WEBSITE MONITORING & TESTING

• Uptime Robot
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• Pingdom
• GTMetrix
• Google Pagespeed Insights
• Google Structured Data Testing Tool
• Varvy
• Screaming Frog

RANK TRACKING & CHECKING

• AWR Cloud
• Whitespark Local Rank Tracker
• Bright Local Search Results Checker

LOCAL CITATIONS

• Whitespark Citation Audit & Cleanup
• Whitespark Citation Building
• Whitespark Local Citation Finder
• Moz Local
• Google My Business

The post My SMB Digital Marketing Toolkit appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Advertising with Google Adwords can be a mixed bag for small business owners. There’s tremendous potential for getting your products and services in front of targeted buyers, especially at a local level, but the options are overwhelming and it can be tricky to understand exactly what you’re getting for your money.

Google is quite content to have business owners fire up a campaign, set a daily budget, add a few keywords, and call it a day. You give them your budget, they give you some clicks… everyone’s happy. Right?

That’s what most small business Adwords campaigns amount to. It’s why they created Adwords Express after all, which simplifies the campaign creation process down to those very basic elements and removes all those pesky options. This is the easiest way to give Google your money, but all those pesky options are how savvy advertisers make the most of their campaigns.

You can do better. Use as many of the following suggestions as possible, and out-fox your local Adwords competition without spending more cash (even if they have bigger budgets than you)!

1. Conversions > Clicks

Forget about clicks. Clicks just cost money. Virtually every effective local Adwords campaign should be centred completely around conversions and “cost-per-conversion” (not to be confused with CPC, cost-per-click). For most local businesses, a conversion would be defined as a contact form fill, an appointment booking, or a phone call.

With conversion data in hand, you might find out that two of your target keywords are bringing in the same amount of clicks, and costing you the same amount of cash – but that one of them is converting like a hot damn, and the other is just costing you money without bringing in any leads. With this insight, you could confidently pull the plug on the poor-converting term and potentially double your return without increasing your investment!

Getting Conversions into Adwords

There are two common ways of getting conversion data in Adwords. Importing data from Google Analytics, and using Adwords’ built-in conversion tracking.

Here’s how Google compares the two options:

Google Analytics goals

• Ideal if you’re interested in the entire flow of customers through your site, not just conversions.
• Can include conversions from non-AdWords sources, so it’s good for tracking all customer traffic on your website.

AdWords conversion tracking

• Ideal if you’re interested only in conversions.
• Tracks conversions only from AdWords sources.

I’m a big advocate of the first option, having all your conversion data consolidated into Google Analytics, and importing it into Adwords. This approach is comprehensive and much more flexible. It’s also easier, and doesn’t require adding multiple additional tracking codes (like Adwords tracking does). Basically, you can have all your conversion data in Analytics and Adwords… or you can have some of it in Analytics and some of it in Adwords.

I’m not even really sure why they have the second option…

Assuming you are already tracking conversions in Analytics (and if you aren’t you should be), importing into Adwords is pretty straightforward:

1. Make sure Adwords and Analytics are linked
2. Make sure you have auto-tagging turned on in Adwords
3. Follow these instructions from Google to set up the import

Note: if you have at least the first two steps above in place, you’ll already be able to see your Adwords and conversion data in Analytics under Acquisition > Adwords. Fun!

Once you have conversions being imported into Adwords, it’s also handy to add the corresponding columns to your Adwords reporting interface. I usually add Conversions and Cost-per-Conversion like so:

Now (after you’ve allowed Adwords to collect some data) go check out your Keywords tab and see how well your target terms are really performing!

2. Call Tracking

Most businesses don’t just get form-fills from their website, they also get calls. Depending on your industry, calls might even be the predominant form of lead generated from your website or your ads. Calls also tend to be a “hotter” lead than a form-fill. And yet most local businesses only have a very vague idea of how many calls they’re getting are coming from their online efforts.

There are two ways to track calls in Adwords…

3rd Party Call Tracking

The ideal solution is to use a 3rd party call tracking platform. This will allow you to track more than just your Adwords calls and get all the data in Analytics.

There’s a common concern in SEO that call tracking is bad, and will disrupt your NAP consistency. This is true if you’re using static call tracking numbers in place of your real phone number in the HTML of your site. Don’t do that.

Modern call tracking setups let you leave your real phone number in the code, and only show your tracked numbers when it’s appropriate. To make sure your call tracking aligns with best practices, fetch your page as Googlebot from Search Console, and verify that your real number is the one it picks up.

3rd party tracking is relatively easy and affordable to set up, and can really round out the measurement of your site’s performance. If calls constitute any significant portion of your web leads (and they probably do), you should be tracking them in your Analytics – and importing them into Adwords.

Here’s a handful of solid call tracking companies:

• CallRail (my fave)
• Infinity
• Convirza
• ActiveDemand

You can also check out this full list of Google Analytics Partner vendors.

Whatever company you go with, the idea is about the same. You use a “pool” of numbers to dynamically swap with your real number on your site. When a user enters your site, their source (organic, cpc, referral) is attributed to that number, and a corresponding event gets sent to your Analytics if they make the call. Obviously the call will be directed to you as usual (you can even record calls, receive text messages, and all other sorts of fancy stuff).

Now, since your Adwords account is importing goal conversions from Analytics, anything tagged as cpc will be recorded in your Adwords account and you’ll have yourself a full representation of your Adwords conversions! Woo!

Adwords’ Built-in Call Forwarding

“But Adwords offers built-in call tracking,” you might say. Well, kind of. If you use Adwords’ Call Forwarding feature on your campaigns, you’ll have to install their number insertion snippet on your site. You’ll only get Adwords calls tracked, and the conversion data will only live in Adwords. It’s better than nothing, but not preferable to getting full call conversion data, as you would with a third party setup.

The only place I’d recommend using Adwords’ Call Forwarding option is in your Call Extensions (calls that take place directly from your ads in the SERPs in other words), since those aren’t typically calls you’d track with your website’s Analytics to begin with.

3. Ad Extensions

Sitelinks Extensions, Call Extensions, Location Extensions, Review Extensions… Use the crap out of them. They provide a richer ad, take up more SERP space, and create extra elements for searchers to engage with.

They don’t cost anything extra, and are generally easy to add to your campaign. Here’s some more info on Ad Extensions, and getting yours set up.

4. Campaign Type: Search Network Only

This one isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but most local businesses are much better off running their primary campaigns as “Search Network Only.” The display network is useful for awareness campaigns (and remarketing, more on that later), but it generally offers much lower conversion rates than Search Network ads.

If you’re looking to generate business from your ads, getting in front of people looking for your exact service right now is going to be infinitely more effective than showing up on every website loosely related to your market.

If you do want to run ads on the Display Network, you should definitely consider separating Display and Search networks into distinct campaigns so you can easily measure their individual performance.

5. Granular Location Targeting

Obviously if you’re running a local adwords campaign for your Brooklyn-based plumbing company (for example), you don’t want your ads showing up for searchers who need a plumber in Seattle. So you’ll target your ads to, let’s say, New York City. This will show your ads in Brooklyn and the surrounding areas like Manhattan, Queens, etc. Perfecto, right?

There’s nothing wrong with this, but if you were to target more granular areas individually, you’d be able to see which areas are performing the best, and then bid adjust in favour of the better performers.

6. Optimized Landing Pages

Most small/local business Adwords ads point to the site’s home page and leave it at that. This might be ok if you have awesome content on your home page, and super clear calls to action. Most often though, home pages are light on content or offer very general information about all the products/services offered by the company.

A more specific, tailor-made page can have a pretty dramatic effect on two important elements of your ad campaign; Quality Score, and conversion rate.

Your ad’s Quality Score is influenced by several factors, with landing page quality being a primary one. If you have an ad targeting ‘deck builders’ pointing to the home page of your general contracting company website, you’re probably not matching the relevance of the ad very well with your landing page and your Quality Score will suffer. And rightfully so! If a user is looking for someone to build them a deck, and they land on your home page, they’re going to still need to look around your site for the deck-related information they’re after – and you might lose them in the process.

For the same reason, you’re also best to have a prominent and convenient call to action for that user on the landing page, so that once they find the information they’re looking for and they’re ready to engage with your business, they don’t have to go digging for your contact form or phone number.

7. Stricter Match Types

Match types are one of the most devastating Adwords settings to overlook for small business owners – and one of the most commonly neglected. In conjunction with Negative Keywords, match types can make a huge difference as to whether your ad shows up for the right queries.

The available match types in Adwords are:

• Broad (ad shows on anything loosely related to the term)
• Broad +modifier (ad shows on searches containing the +modified term)
• “Phrase” (ad shows on searches containing the full phrase targeted)
• [Exact] (ad shows on searches containing only the exact target term/phrase)

I’ll let Google explain what each of these mean in detail, but in local ad campaigns on a small budget, you’ll almost never want to use straight up broad matching. Of course, this is the default match type when you spin up a campaign, so it’s very common for business owners to have all their campaign’s terms set to broad match resulting in tons $$ being spent on clicks that aren’t a good fit.

The best combination of match types depends on the individual campaign, but I find using broad modified and phrase match to be pretty effective in almost all situations.

Let’s say you run a hot tub repair business… Here’s a simplified example of what your ad might show up on under each match type:

Hot tub repair (broad match)

• Hot tubs
• Hot tub sales
• Best hot tub brands
• Costco hot tubs
• Hot tub repairs
• Hot tub cleaner
• Hot tub covers
• Hot tub replacement parts
• Spa maintenance

Hot tub +repair (broad modified)

• Hot tub repair company
• Bathtub repair
• Hot tub cover repair
• Spa repair

“Hot tub repair” (phrase match)

• Hot tub repairs
• Hot tub repair companies
• Where to get hot tub repairs
• Hot tub repair technicians

[hot tub repair] (exact match)

• Hot tub repair
• Hot tub repairs

Notice how many phrases you probably don’t want to pay for clicks on in the first grouping, and how they can all be avoided by using a more strict match type!

Don’t stop there though… the other fundamental component to keeping your targeting neat and tidy is your negative keywords list.

8. Negative Keywords

Negative Keywords are terms you tell your Adwords campaign to avoid completely. You may want to start your campaign out with a few obvious Negative Keywords. Using our hot tub repairman example above, you might want to add the following keywords to your Negative Keywords List right from the get go:

• Sales
• Parts
• Brands
• Costco
• Covers

You should also maintain your Negative Keywords list on an ongoing basis. Maintaining your negative keywords list is part of a healthy balanced, breakfa- Adwords campaign. Are you doing it? You should be.

Check Your Search Terms

Regardless of your match types, head over to the Keywords tab in your Adwords interface, and click on the Search Terms button.

This will reveal all the actual search queries that resulted in a click on your ad, as well as how much it cost you, and how many conversions it resulted in. Brace yourself though, if you’ve never reviewed this report it can sometimes be a bit painful to look at. Seeing all those weird terms your ad somehow got shown for, and how much you spent for those clicks can be downright gnarly.

It’s a good hurt though, because now you can start marking those terms as Negative Keywords, banishing them from ever triggering your ad again!

9. Mobile-Only Click-to-Call

If phone calls are more valuable to your business than form-fills or other actions, you might want to consider running a mobile-only click-to-call campaign.

This is a campaign set to show only on mobile devices that can make calls, and that substitutes the traditional website link for a click-to-call link. No one will visit your website from this ad. Instead, your phone number will be added to the user’s mobile dialler and all they need to do is make the call.

I’ve seen these campaigns drastically reduce the cost-per-conversion for companies like plumbers and lawyers where the cost-per-click is high due to competition. Why? Because with this type of campaign, just about every click turns directly into a conversion!

The basic setup for one of these campaigns is:

1. Create a new campaign
2. For Ad Type, select Search Network only and Call-only.
3. Set your target locations & budget
4. Consider scheduling ads for your office/reception hours
5. Create your ad

10. Remarketing

Remarketing (AKA retargeting) is often the best way to use the Display Network for small businesses, as it allows you to target users with super clear intent on the cheap. There’s almost no reason you shouldn’t have a remarketing campaign in place!

Essentially, a remarketing campaign shows ads on the Display Network to users who have already visited your site. The advantages of this are significant:

• Users who have already visited your site are probably the best group you could ever find to target with display ads. They’ve already shown they’re directly interested in your business!
• The Adwords display network is everywhere. YouTube, eBay, CNN, The Guardian, Forbes, and so on.Broadly targeted display ads on these networks can get really expensive (and may convert poorly), but showing up there can make your business look like a big deal.
• In a remarketing campaign, showing up on these major websites is super cheap because you’re only targeting a relatively small group of users.
• Your ads remind users about your brand. If they had taken a look around at you and your competitors’ sites, and then decided to think about it before engaging – your remarketing ads might be the difference maker!

The basic steps to setting up your remarketing campaign are:

1. Create your Remarketing Audience list in Analytics
2. Create a new Adwords campaign that you’ll use specifically for Remarketing
3. Create some snazzy display ads (Adwords’ ad builder is decent – or make something extra slick withGoogle Web Designer), set your budget, and let’er rip!

Keep an eye on your campaign and tweak the budget depending on its performance after a couple weeks. You can also experiment with different ad styles and messages.

Boom!

Now you’re equipped with some serious artillery that most small business/local Adwords campaigns are not taking advantage of. Roll as many of these suggestions as you can into your Adwords account, and you’ll be getting way better value out of your Adwords spend than any of your local competitors – and on your way to world domination… probably.

Good luck! And let me know in the comments if you have any questions about these tips, or any tips of your own to add.

The post 10 Ways to Drastically Improve Your Small/Local Business Adwords Campaigns appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Update: So far it’s annoying to switch properties/views, and I don’t like it.

The post Analytics Interface Change appeared first on Nick Pierno.

Hosting websites can be a pretty harrowing experience, especially when it’s for clients. Pretty much every site I’m involved with is built on WordPress, which means a constantly updating core, themes, and a handful of plugins from various third-party developers. WordPress is wonderful in many ways, but the anxiety about script compatibilities, security threats, and even simple accidental clicks on the backend can leave you with less hair on your head and shorter nails on your fingers.

Recommended Managed WordPress Hosts:

• 
  WP ENGINE
  
• 
  FLYWHEEL
  

Pro Tip: Before you sign up for any hosting, check for available promo codes to get a discount. Also, for WP Engine, I recommend always signing up for a year at a time. You get 2 months free, and you can cancel any time and get a refund for unused months!

In the past few years, an industry has emerged to help ease some of the tension involved in hosting WordPress sites, and it addresses most of these major concerns very well. It’s called Managed WordPress Hosting, and it has matured to a point where I believe it should be the standard for most situations in which folks need to host WordPress websites. In other words, I think managed WordPress hosting is the best WordPress hosting.

Why..? I’m glad you asked Here are 4 convincing reasons why managed WordPress hosting is the best way to host WordPress sites:

1. Off-server Daily Backups with 1-Click Restore

This has been a game-changer for me. I no longer break into a cold sweat before every plugin or theme update. I’m always 100% confident that I have a backup of my sites that can be restored within seconds. Yea, you can absolutely have backups without using Managed WordPress Hosting (and I hope you do), but they’re usually pretty clunky to create – and even clunkier to restore in a pinch.

Most cPanel hosting providers require you to submit a ticket (and even pay a fee in some cases) in order to restore a backup. They also usually keep user-generated backups in the root folder on the same server (not so great if your server has been compromised by hacking). If you restore a server backup, you’re probably restoring all the websites you host on that server to the state they were in when you took the backup. It’s all pretty inconvenient.

Other folks might use backup plugins in their WordPress installs. These are pretty handy, but I’ve had mixed results with them. Sometimes they behave the way I expected, sometimes not. And if you’re locked out of your WordPress backend, and don’t know your way around FTP and phpMyAdmin, you might be hooped. Not very confidence inspiring.

On my WP Engine Account (where I host all of mine and my clients’ sites), I know I can count on a few things:

• Individual daily backups of every install
• Backups stored off-site on Amazon S3
• 1-click ad-hawk backups I can perform in seconds (depending on site size)
• 1-click restores that are live in seconds, undoing any oopsies I may have incurred during updates or “trying something new”

Speaking of trying new things, many Managed WordPress Hosts also offer staging environments. They are super handy.

2. Staging Environments

Not every Managed WordPress provider offers this, but many do, and the others seem to be working towards it. If you get into Managed WordPress Hosting without this feature, though, you’re missing out. A staging environment allows you to make an exact duplicate of your existing site on a completely separate domain. You can then make whatever changes you want to the staging site and see everything in live action before pushing the whole shebang back to you production site. This allows you to get as adventurous as you want with plugins, themes, and anything else – and even show your clients, peers, etc. before committing to changes.

Isn’t this fun? Know what else is fun? Fast websites are fun.

3. Speed & Infrastructure

The M.O. of most of these Managed WordPress Hosting providers is that their infrastructure is built exclusively for WordPress, and all it’s eccentricities. What that roughly translates to in real life is often way better page load speeds for your users. All things being equal, the same website on a basic shared hosting plan will be significantly outpaced by a decent Managed WordPress Host, thanks to custom-built architecture and advanced, non-annoying, caching systems (I’m looking at you, caching plugins).

Another huge advantage to a server configured specifically for WordPress is that you won’t run into those weird compatibility issues with WordPress functions, themes, or plugins that you might encounter on whatever random stack of software your average host is using.

You can definitely achieve the same, or even better results, on the dollar with a super slick VPS or dedicated server setup… if you really know what you’re doing, and have the time to do it. But a good Managed WordPress host can get you pretty outstanding performance and reliability on a reasonable budget, without having to wear yet another daunting hat. And if you’re not a server-architect extraordinaire, there’s another area of hosting that might be the most daunting of all. Security.

4. Security

Security is obviously important, but it’s still one of the most overlooked aspects of having websites on the internet. Especially in the era where virtually anyone with a little ambition can figure out how to build their own website – and where the vast majority of folks are using the same open-source softwares to build those websites on.

The whole backup and restore situation mentioned above goes a very long way to helping you keep things secure on your WordPress site because it removes one of the major barriers to performing those updates in the first place. While keeping your software up to date is the single most important thing you can do to stay safe out there, there are numerous other aspects to server security that I really don’t even understand well enough to explain here. The folks at your Managed WordPress Hosting company do understand these things though, and they make security a pillar of their offerings. Some of them even guarantee your site’s security – and if it ever gets hacked, they’ll fix it for free. That is some serious peace of mind right there.

Downsides

Nothing in this life is perfect, and there are some minimal sacrifices you may need to make in order to use a Managed WordPress Host for your website(s)

Price

Site-for-site, a Managed WordPress Host will cost most than your average shared hosting provider. Most of them also require you to pay per installation. It’s very much a case of “you get what you pay for” though, as the shared hosting plan you pay $10/month for is generally a steaming pile of garbage in terms of features, resources, security, support, etc. As you get into the better traditional hosting setups, you get into much closer pricing territory. Basically, if you’re not a server wizard, I think you’ll get your money’s worth from a reputable Managed WordPress Hosting provider.

Disallowed Plugins

Some Managed WordPress Providers have a list of plugins they don’t allow on their ecosystem, either because they pose a security risk, or they run away with your server’s resources and put a strain on the whole platform. I’ve never personally encountered a disallowed plugin I actually wanted to use though, and for the most part I’m happy that plugins are being audited by someone who knows more than me.

Recommended Managed WordPress Hosts

1. WP Engine – I think these guys are the bomb-diggety. They are the de-facto leader in the space, and I use them for every site I build for myself or for clients. They have the best list of features for the best price. Their support kicks ass, and I couldn’t imagine my WordPress life without them. WP Engine is also that host that guarantees your site’s security, and if anything ever goes wrong they’ll get it all cleaned up for free.
2. Flywheel – These guys offer a smaller list of features, but their price reflects it. They have a beautiful interface and some cool features of their own. Check them out if you’re on a tighter budget.
3. Pagely – Industrial strength Managed WordPress Hosting. Quite a bit more expensive, but it’s who the big enterprise guys use.

Note to server geeks: None of this is to say that if you’re some badass server architect with your own setup on Linode, doing all this stuff and more already (and faster, and cheaper), that you shouldn’t keep on your merry way. This is for the majority of us who just want to run businesses or build client websites without all the technical bother – and worry a lot less

Good luck and happy hosting!

The post 4 Reasons I use Managed WordPress Hosting over Shared Hosting appeared first on Nick Pierno.

There’s a heck of a lot more to SEO than I’m about to put forth here – but I hope this post can serve as an accessible way for the layperson to wrap their head how search engines work.

Search rankings can be largely reduced to this simple equation:

Relevance * Authority = Rankings

Relevance determines what your pages will rank for and authority determines how well.

That’s really all there is to it. Yes, search engines like Google consider over 200 ranking factors in determining where to place your site in their SERPs (search engine result pages), but most of them either fall neatly into this equation, or you don’t need to worry about them to form a basic understanding of SEO.

And that’s just the thing… the technicalities of SEO can be completely overwhelming. They all have their place, but search engines ultimately have one goal: to give users the best result for their search. They’ve evolved drastically over the years in an effort to beat the people who try to game the system, and they’re going to keep doing that. A common mantra among web marketers and developers is “don’t build websites for search engines, build them for people.” This can be very powerful advice, since how search engines behave is constantly moving towards interpreting the web more like humans. That doesn’t mean you should completely ignore SEO, but it’s a good reason to take a step back from the complexity of SEO, and see the forest for the trees.

Scammy or complicated tactics to win rankings come and go, but the two main pillars of SEO, relevance and authority, have been around since the beginning – and they’re here to say.

Relevance

Relevance is the first and most critical piece of every SEO puzzle. Relevance is established almost entirely on your website on a page-by-page basis by a process most people call “on page SEO.” In the simplest terms, search engines see each URL on your site as an individual page. In order to rank for a phrase or concept, you need to have a web page on your site that is relevant to the query.

The best bet for ranking on a phrase is usually to have a specific page as close to the concept you wish to rank for as possible. There’s a delicate art to how granularly you slice up your concepts into target phrases and individual pages on your site, which has swung from one end of the spectrum in the early days of SEO (one landing page per target phrase) to the other (not targeting phrases at all, and only targeting general topics), but the best approach is most often somewhere in between – as Rand Fishkin of MOZ explains very well in this Whiteboard Friday video.

Establishing Relevance

Search engines interpret your web pages a lot like a person interprets a magazine article.

People start at the top, and determine what the article is about by reading the title, headings, and sub-headings. They also take into account what magazine they’re reading (an article about cars in a woodworking magazine might seem out of place), and how prominently the article is featured (was it mentioned on the cover page? is it a big important article or a small one-off?) All these tendencies are reflected in how search engines crawl your web pages and determine the relevance of the pages.

Web pages are composed of a handful of important elements that most search engines (and readers) prioritize for relevance as follows:

1. Title Tag
2. URL
3. Headings (H1, H2, etc)
4. Body text
5. Media (images, videos, etc)

I recommend including your target terms naturally into these elements by order of importance, but not stuffing them in simply for the sake of it, or repeating them over and over again. Just like a person, when a search bot reads your content, they can also tell if it’s meaningful – or if it’s just a bunch of words put together for the sake of targeting phrases to rank on.

Want more insight into the perfectly optimized page? Let me Google that for you

Once you have a well-targeted page, you may not even need anything else to get top rankings. That is, if there’s little or no competition for a phrase you’ve established clear relevance for – that might be all you need. If I made a page right now that directly targeted something extremely obscure, it could take the top spot in a few hours!

Keyword Research

You can rank #1 all day and night for something, but if no one is searching for it there’s not much value in it. Even more important than establishing relevance on your web pages is establishing relevance on the right thing.

One of the most useful tools for doing keyword research is Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner.

It’s free, but you do need an AdWords account to use it (however you don’t need an active campaign). Here’s a basic (and slightly outdated – sorry) guide to using it for keyword research.

Some other great tools for doing keyword research are:

• Google Trends
• Ubersuggest
• Keywordtool.io
• KWFinder (paid)
• MOZ Keyword Difficulty Tool (paid)
• SEMrush (paid)

The most lucrative terms are those with the highest volume of searches, but those are also most often highly competitive. Maybe you’ll find a gem or two that are high volume/low competition. In order to evaluate the competition (other websites who’ve already established some degree of relevance on your desired phrases), you’ll need to take a look at their…

Authority

Authority is how the search engines measure the worthiness of your web page against that of all the others vying for a particular ranking spot. All relevance factors being equal, it is the authority of a page that will ultimately determine how well it ranks.

Where relevance is the most important factor in a page’s ranking (a blank page with infinite authority can’t rank for anything), authority is far and away the most powerful factor. A page with massive authority that simply mentions a certain phrase in its body copy can easily outrank a perfectly optimized page with inferior authority.

Measuring Authority

Authority doesn’t have a fully standardized means of measurement, but the closest we have in the SEO industry are MOZ Domain Authority & Page Authority, which can be measured using their Open Site Explorer tool, or a variety of other tools that use its API including MOZ’s SEO Toolbar and a number of Chrome and Firefox extensions (my personal go-to is SEO Site Tools for Chrome).

There are numerous other tools with their own indexes that provide a version of domain and page authority metrics, including SEMrush and Ahrefs. They all have their pros and cons, but generally each will provide a decent comparison of authority relative to itself. MOZ’s Domain and Page Authority, however, are the most widely used and are accessible for free.

These metrics are often abbreviated to DA and PA. Essentially, DA measures the authority of the domain, or the website as a whole, and PA measures the authority of each individual page… But you probably sorted that out already

An authoritative domain can have its pages rank without them necessarily having their own page authority. An obvious example of this would be when CNN publishes a new article on a hot topic, that article may rank well in Google before anyone starts linking to it. Similarly, a strong page can rank in spite of a weak domain. An example of this would be a blog post on a small website that gains critical mass and becomes the primary traffic generator for that website.

Sizing Up the Competition

We can use DA and PA as a rough means of gauging competition for a given search result. Plug your target term into Google and look at the first result (and the second, and maybe the tenth). If one of these pages are well-optimized, clearly targeting your searches intent, and if MOZ tells you that page has 50 PA while your site has 10 – you’re going to have to grow your page’s authority in order to outrank them.

On the other hand, if these pages have killer authority, but don’t actually have your searched term prominently featured in their title tag, or the ranking pages don’t seem to really match the intent of your search, there may be an opportunity to create a more relevant page and sidestep the authority game (or perhaps you’ll need some authority to outrank them, but not actually more than them).

Building Authority

This is the hardest part of SEO, period. And it should be! The goal of every search result is to give the searcher the absolute best page on the internet that relates to what they are looking for. While there are of course many nuanced facets to how a search engine determines authority, what is and always shall be the most prominent authority-driver is links.

Links from other websites that point to yours indicate that your content was deemed valuable by others. The more of them your domain or page has, the more confident a search engine can be in the quality of your content. Not all links are equal, though. Far from it. The value of a link is largely determined by the DA and PA of the linking page, so a link from The National Post is going to be worth a lot more to your site than one from scammy-link-farm-directory.net.

You can think of websites like investors, and links like currency. Mark Cuban is a well-known investor. If he invests in your product, that endorsement goes a lot farther than if your uncle Jim does. Even if they invest the same amount, Cuban’s investment will help you get other investments, and give your product more visibility.

The context of the link is also considered (what kind of page it’s on, what that page is about) as well as the words contained in the link “anchor text” itself. There’s a lot more value in getting an editorial link to your freelance SEO website in an article about “The Top 5 Freelance SEO’s Ever” with the anchor text Nick is the best freelance SEO guy out there, than there is from being on a handful of self-submitted web directories with your business name as the anchor text.

A few popular ways of generating links to your site are:

• Directory link building (adding your business/site to relevant business directories)
• Guest posting (writing posts on other websites’ blogs)
• Competitive link building (finding pages that link to your competitors, but don’t link to you, and asking them for a link)
• Broken link building (finding pages that link to other pages that don’t work anymore or suck, and providing a better page to link to on your own site)
• Link outreach (connecting with website owners in relevant areas to your own, and explore opportunities for acquring links)
• Link baiting or content marketing (building great content that attracts traffic and links by virtue of its greatness)

Link Bait & Content Marketing

One of the most popular and effective means of generating authority for your site is by not doing link building at all. If you can create amazing content and get it in front of the right audience, you can potentially garner more links of a higher quality than by any other approach. One single blog post that hits a critical mass can accumulate links from 100’s of sites, or from enormous sites like national news publications, etc. Content can come in many forms: blog posts, infographics, resources, tools, etc.

If you always find your customers asking the same questions, or your industry peers always need to do some certain calculation and there are no solid answers or tools out there – those might be opportunities to create high-value content that could generate traffic, links, and authority for years to come! Everything I’ve linked to in this post is an example of those sites accumulating links by providing good content!

Follow/nofollow

Authority passed from one page to another is often referred to as “link juice” or “link equity.” When one website links to another, they give away a little bit of link equity away to the site they link to. Don’t get too hung up on this, as it’s far from a 1:1 relationship and linking off your site in a natural way can be a good thing, but helps illustrate why certain websites use the “nofollow” attribute in their links.

Nofollowing a link asks the search engine crawling the page to ignore the link, and not count it as an investment from the website. Links from directories (like Yellow Pages), social sites (like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit), or comment sections are often nofollowed so as to prevent abusing these sites to build quick links. Nofollowed links can still be valuable, either simply by generating traffic, or in some cases still passing on some equity, but they offer significantly less authority to the sites they link to than their followed counterparts.

Spam = Bad

A lot of folks try and artificially generate links by creating some form of web spam. Whether it’s buying PBN’s on Fivr, or commenting on blog posts with a link back to your site until your fingers bleed (or creating a bot to do it for you). Some of these tactics can work temporarily, but most often result in domain penalties that can tarnish your site’s reputation (and ability to rank) for years, or forever. If you want to build a sustainable web presence, it’s probably best to avoid spam at all costs.

Social Shares

Social networks’ contribution to DA and PA is debatable. They can absolutely offer indirect authority boosts, by generating traffic to your site (which can then result in links and other authority signals), but simply putting your content on Facebook isn’t going to have a significant impact on your site’s authority in and of itself.

One handy thing to keep in mind, especially if you have a smaller or newer website, is that Google’s network, Google+, does help speed up the indexing process when you create new content. For example, when you create a new post on your blog, Google doesn’t know it exists until it follows a link to it from somewhere else. Until your post is noticed by Google, or “indexed” it won’t show up anywhere in the search results. Sharing your new blog posts on Google+ is a pretty reliable way to make sure Google begins to evaluate it for relevance and authority as quickly as possible.

For more in-depth advice on building links to your site, here’s a crazy-good guide from Brian Dean at Backlinko.

Learn how to build a successful blog with Matthew Woodward’s How To Start A Blog Tutorial.

TL;DR

• Relevance determines what your pages will rank for.
• Establish relevance with your page structure, title tags, headings and content.
• Research search volumes to find the best phrases to target.
• Authority determines how well you’ll rank on something your page is relevant for.
• Measure authority by MOZ’s DA and PA, or the metrics used by other popular tools.
• Consider the DA and PA of your competition when deciding what to target.
• Find ways to acquire links to your website without being a spammy jerk.
• Great content is one excellent way to generate activity and links.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

The post The SEO Equation: The Basics of Search Engine Optimization that Everyone Should Know appeared first on Nick Pierno.

It’s a bit long-form – so here’s a more consumable list of reasons current, steadfast Android users might consider buying an iPhone 6:

Third Party Keyboards

I can’t be the only Android user who’s almost had a panic attack trying to use an Apple keyboard in the past few years… (I’m exaggerating, but not by much). No gesture typing? No long press for numbers and characters? No choice in the matter whatsoever?

That’s all about to change, and I think opening up to third party keyboards is the single most influential change Apple could have made towards bringing in Android users.

Screen Sizes

A very close second is the new, larger screens. The smallest one is about the size of my Nexus 5, which makes the current iPhone model look like a phone for ants. This is roughly the form factor most people seem to want, regardless of make. Sure it foregoes a little bit of thumb/screen accessibility, and sure Steve Jobs is probably rolling in his grave, but it seems to be a sacrifice users are willing to make for more screen real estate.

I’d say good on Apple for adapting here, but they really just had to do this to remain relevant.

And then there’s the 5.5. The one that caught my eye. I was going to get a big ridiculous phablet as my next phone regardless, and the iPhone 6+ is one indeed, but it seems more manageable than it’s Android contemporaries. I just hope they put a monster battery in there.

Camera

Few would argue that Apple packs a killer shooter into it’s phones. This isn’t anything new, and while some Android phones do have excellent cameras, they either completely overshadow the device’s other functionality, or simply aren’t as well-rounded as the iSight.

Continuity & Handoff

Google’s suite of communication and productivity tools are really good (Hangouts, Drive, Gmail, etc.), and having them work persistently across devices is wonderful. Frankly Apple’s iCloud, iMessage, and iOffice (or whatever) never really seemed appealing to me. Too flaky, limited, and lame (respectively).

I don’t really know enough about how Apple is implementing these new ‘Continuity’ features, but they sound in a lot of ways like a decent answer to what Google currently does so well. Better late than never.

Opening Up

We talked about it in keyboards and screen sizes. Apple is relinquishing some of their seemingly unshakable paradigms, and turning iOS into a more open-minded platform.

Slowly but surely we will see greater ability for customization, and more leeway for developers to do cool things.

App Store

I haven’t spent much time in Apple’s App Store in recent years, but I know the Google Play Store has really matured. There’s still plenty of garbage in there, but the interface is great, downloads are fast, there’s a timed refund window, and you can do it all from your web browser.

An app store is really only as good as its apps though. And while Android has developed a very respectable catalogue indeed, Apple is still the first place (and sometimes only place) the best developers go to.

Every Android user has a handful of apps they’re patiently waiting for their version of.

Google’s Apps

Know what you’ll also find in the App Store? Quite a few of the things that you love on your Android. Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Chrome…

So apps-wise, you can get Google on an iPhone – but not Apple on an Android. That made sense. Shut up.

Apple Pay

Apple can make tech stick like no one else. Even Google hasn’t been able to get mobile payments off the ground… But Apple is about to put potential sales in the pocket of millions of shoppers, and retail has been made aware.

Also, and I don’t usually knock Google (shh.. they’re listening), I’d kinda rather Apple win this one anyway. They’re in the business of selling products. Google is in the business of getting all the data, which doesn’t exactly pair well with my most sensitive assets.

WiFi Calling

Like paying for things, this is nothing new to the industry. Like Apple Pay, they’re probably going to do it really well, and their influence will lead to mass adoption. Maybe even Canada will get it.

Design

Last but not least, Apple makes great products. They have access to the best designers, engineers, and fabrication techniques, and it shows. For as long as I’ve been an Android faithful, I’ve had daydreams of running Android on some larger version of an iPhone…

Well, maybe Apple has finally made the iPhone 6 just Android-y enough for that to come true!

The post 10 Reasons Android Users May Consider the iPhone 6 appeared first on Nick Pierno.

I also love my Nexus 5, and I’ve barely had it long enough to be in upgrade mode. But I am. For everything it does so well (especially for the price) my values have shifted a bit, and I’m no longer inclined to overlook the two major caveats of this phone; Camera and battery.

As the years rush by I’m in wonder of the photos section of my Google Plus account. It, like, chronologically documents my life.. automatically. All my photos and videos just show up there. Sometimes they even get the “auto-awesome” treatment.

It just kinda bums me out how mediocre all my photos and videos are. Not to mention all the missed opportunities from slow autofocus, bad low light sensing, etc. I know, I know.. woe is me. But if I can, I’d like to look back on the next 5 years with a bit more fidelity.

I’ve also been stricken with a bit of a bum rap this past year. I have an illness that has kept me stuck at home and in beds/bathrooms/waiting rooms/etc. a lot more than usual. This results in increased phone use, and of course, battery drain. Well… turns out the Nexus 5, despite being a truly outstanding phone, isn’t a champion of endurance.

One more thing… (see what I did there?) Though this wouldn’t be a good enough reason to upgrade on its own, all that phone-using time has made me long for a larger screen.

So explore the newer, big-screened, flagshippy Android phones out there! Right?

Well, I have, and I’m just not completely sold on anything. And when I went to reserve one for Lindsey (my fiance), I got a crazy idea… Maybe I’ll give it another kick at the can!

I’m not necessarily jumping ship here. And I’m quite interested to see Android L and whatever new Nexus/Shamu/Silver device it comes with. I’ve also taken a pretty close look at the upcoming Note 4, the new Moto X, the LG G3, HTC M8, OnePlus One and Sony Xperia… *deep breath*

But if I didn’t reserve an iPhone now I’d be looking at next year to get one at retail, and frankly I’d rather be selling than buying when the holiday season hits.

So what are the key factors that might make an Android lover consider switching?

First, you have to be a bit platform-agnostic. I use a MacBook and Windows PC at home. I just switched to a Mac at work from my Windows setup. I’ve had iPhones, Blackberries, Nexi, Motos, iPads, and Tablets of all OS’s. I just like using whatever works best for me.

As long as you’re not too hung up on what logo your devices has, here are a few things that I think make the new iPhone and OS work a lot better for Android users than before.

Third Party Keyboards

This was always my biggest issue. Virtual keyboards still completely suck, and they are the thing you probably use the most on your phone.

For me, a keyboard that accommodates normal thumb typing and gesture (swype) typing is an absolute must because they suck slightly less. If this hadn’t changed, I wouldn’t have even thought twice about these snazzy new devices.

Jury’s still out. But I’d venture a guess that SwiftKey on iPhone will be a sleeper-game-changer. You read it here.

Screen Sizes

Apple ate some crow on this one. I’m actually a bit surprised they didn’t even keep the present form factor and add a size or two to say “Steve Jobs was still right, our customers are just also right too.”

But alas. Bigger is better. And the 5.5 screen might just scratch that Note 4 itch I have.

I haven’t overlooked the fact that the Note packs a crazy high res 5.7 screen into roughly the same form factor though. And if Apple doesn’t think I can see the difference between 401 and 515 ppi, then I guess they’ll never make a higher res screen than this and I’ll never have to upgrade!

Realistically the iPhone isn’t the winner on displays. The point is they offer bigger ones. And since I’m sure they’re still plenty pleasant to behold, they’re another reason I’m opening myself up to seeing other OS’s.

Camera & Video

As I mentioned before, this is a major reason I want to settle into a different device, regardless of OS. It’s not crystal clear who the king of cam is (certainly there are phones with an even greater emphasis on camera.. but not without sacrifices), but when Apple claims they changed mobile photography I can hardly argue.

The iPhone camera is consistently outstanding. And with features like time lapse, video stabilization, and 240 fps video done the Apple way, I’m sure these new devices will set another bar for convenient media-making.

Here’s some iPhone footage from the Keynote. Just wow.

Continuity & Handoff

One of my most used Android features is Hangouts. I can take my conversations from phone to full computer/keyboard at my whimsy. I know Hangouts is on iPhone, and they have iMessage, but hangouts being my one source for conversation is really handy. It doesn’t hurt that my office runs on Google Apps and everyone uses hangouts to communicate.

Apple’s Continuity features seem to be addressing a lot of this pretty elegantly, and is even bringing texting to your Mac, regardless of who you’re chatting with and what device they use.

Don’t get too excited. I think the SMS portion of Apple’s new Continuity service is getting delayed.. and I not sure how any of this applies to Canadians like myself… but that would be one killer feature.

Obviously, this feature won’t hold much sand for Windows users, but I look forward to seeing how it can enhance the Mac/iPhone experience.

Opening up & Cross-app Talk

iOS as a platform is opening up a fair amount, including more ability for applications to communicate with each other. Another thing that makes iOS more like Android, and another reason I’m open to it.

App Store

Google’s Play Store has really come into it’s own, and the last time I was in Apple’s App Store it was a really slow and cumbersome experience.

Now the performance may have been the two year old iPad’s fault (the iPad 3 retina, one of Apple’s bastard sons), but I still think Google’s really got a great thing going. Timed refunds and installing from your browser come to mind immediately.

Apple’s App store is more mature though, and is still often the first and sometimes only place the get the best apps and games.

Google Apps

If I move to an iPhone, I can still use Google Chrome, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Authenticator, Drive, G+, and so on, and so forth. And thank goodness, because Google is better at almost all of those things.

WiFi Calling

Tim Cook almost seemed like he thought Apple invented WiFi calling when he revealed the feature. It sounded silly.

As with many technologies Apple uses, this isn’t anything new… but they’ll probably do it really well. And that’d be nice, because I get worse reception than Mars at my house.

Design/Hardware

Last but not least, nothing is built like an Apple. They consistently offer unprecedented visual design and build quality. They also support their devices better than anyone else, even if Apple support has deteriorated a bit with their growth over the years.

I could go on… but just look at it.

If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?

I haven’t used an iPhone for any meaningful amount of time since the 4s, and I have’t gotten a really good chance to experience iOS 7 (a couple weeks on a sluggish iPad 3 retina actually had me pretty disgruntled). A lot will just come down to seeing how it feels, but there are still a few things I’m not sure about.

Lock screen

I’m not a fan of the song and dance most people do to use their phones. Swiping, passwords, gestures… all an extra step to get to what’s doing.

I see the value of the extra security, but I haven’t lost a phone in 15 years – and if I did, I’d remotely wipe it. In my daily life, I relish being able to just press the power button and go.

Bypassing this is a snap on Android. Maybe there’s an app for this on iPhone.. Maybe the fingerprint unlock is just that slick.. We’ll see.

Notifications

The concept of automatically turning on the screen every time I get a notification absolutely baffles me. I won’t even go into it because it makes me angry.

Android does it really well. Little flashy light lets me know what’s up, power button, pull down top menu, see all notifications.

iPhones can probably achieve this flow more or less now I’m assuming. I’ll just have to play with it.

Customization

The older I get, the less I care to visually enhance my interfaces. But when I can hack at something a bit to make it work more efficiently, that’s valuable to me. I’m not holding my breath for all of my little workflow hacks to port over to iOS, but again, we’ll see!

Price/Specs

This will likely never change, and while I could wax philosophic all day about tech giant business models the simple fact is that Apple products cost more to make, they cost more to buy, and they don’t always compete on spec/$.

Especially when it comes to the things we interact with 100x a day for work and life, it really just comes down to how it feels – and how it works for you.

Investment in Android

Having been in Android land for several years now, I’ve bought some apps. They’ll be there if I ever come back I guess… like the App Store apps I have waiting for me from the past!

Navigation/Multitasking

At least from my limited experience, Android’s persistent three button navigation/multitasking setup is the bomb-diggetty and iOS’s device navigation is a bit more spastic. Maybe I just need to get used to it though…

Bottom Line

I’m going to putz around with a Space Grey 64 Gig iPhone 6 Plus and see how it goes. If it’s not for me I’ll pass it along and report back either way.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on the matter. Just be gentle..

The post I Strongly Prefer Android, So Why did I Pre-order an iPhone? appeared first on Nick Pierno.